Hottop Roaster Tips

Home coffee roasting is fun You get the joy of selecting the exact varietal, country, region and even estate for the green coffee beans you'll roast. Plus, you get the fantastic gourmet cofee — not the "gourmet coffee" that really means "flavored coffee beans" — but real fresh roasted coffee beans from your own coffee bean roaster.
With the Hottop Coffee Roaster, home coffee roasting becomes an extremely repeatable experience. The Hottop's electronics, even in the non-digital model, have a good built-in roasting profile.
Whether you're roasting for drip coffee, for vacuum pot coffee, for French Press coffee, for espresso or for espresso-based drinks, the Hottop makes the process easy to roast the best coffee beans.

Back-to-Back Coffee Roasting Batches

When you eject a batch, pull the chaff tray. Then, pull the bean chute cover and pull out the rear filter _most_ of the way. IN THAT ORDER -- or you'll suck the chaff out of the tray into the Hottop!
That process will cool the Hottop quickly, even in a Baton Rouge summer. Sometimes that was cool enough that the next heating cycle would start immediately after I pressed the Start button. Usually, though, when I started the Hottop again, it continued a cooling cycle for another 3.5 minutes.
My cold startup was about 4.5-5.0 minutes from start to "add the beans BEEP." With the cooling from the increased airflow of pulling the chaff tray, bean chute cover and rear filter, the start to "add the beans BEEP" was about the same.
Without this process, I saw my Hottop take from 10 to 25 minutes to cool enough that it would start the next heating cycle.

Premature Dumping of Coffee Beans

Clean the "button" thermocouple which is located on the back wall of the Hottop's roasting chamber. Failure to keep it clean won't immediately bother you, but longer term the Hottop will think that its getting hotter than it really is. this might result in under-roasted batches. Or, in extreme cases, it can result in premature dumping of the beans. Don't overload the Hottop with too many beans. If you have the beans totally covering the button thermocouple, you can end up getting false "overheating" readings, which result in automatic, premature dumping of the beans.